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@opinion-collector
its not "processing" when theres rules about what im allowed to think and feel. it's not "processing" when theres a single ideological pre-approved conclusion i am allowed to come to. thats not processing. its conditioning and indoctrination.
also "the evil is baked into the social institutions" political party: psychiatry is good and you should trust psychiatry.
pro psych leftists are like: individual solutions to systemic problems are awesomeeeeee everyone should try these individual solutions to systemic problems
I'm going to *remembers how many times in my life I didn't tell anyone I was suicidal* you know, I'm not going to, but I honestly think even joking about it is better than never talking about it, and I think people who have dealt with such a difficult thing deserve to be able to joke about our own experiences without getting lectured about some knock-off CBT that's been ground up and shat out of the online pop psychology void, and also you know this format in itself is a suicide joke right it's just euphemistic
Weird phenomenon I’ve noticed is that when a young person learns new information and expresses it, the reason they did not previously know it, is automatically attributed to age. But when an older person does it, age is not considered a factor, they’re just assumed they were out of the loop.
Now obviously, on the surface, this makes sense. But the problem is that it becomes a convenient excuse to be ageist.
“Has anyone else noticed x?” “I just realized y!”
“Oh my god 😂 Everyone already knew this. You’re just 21 😂”
And mocking people for not knowing something also happens to older people, but the go to comment for young people is some pejorative remark about their age. Because to the commenter, a young person just happening not to know something is proof of their inherent inferiority.
And if you think “mean internet comments” aren’t that deep, let’s just think about this for sec. If everyone above 30ish feels the instinctive urge to make fun of young people, nodding collectively that “yes, young people are inherently less intelligent and knowledgeable” than how do you think that translates to young people trying make decisions about their own lives? Their own bodies? Like you know that young people who can get pregnant are routinely denied sterilization because of their age, right? And young trans people are also denied transition because of their age? “Mean internet comments” is actually a symptom and a pipeline to real world harm.
Being under 25 is such a fun experience! At almost every turn and for almost every little thing, you’re humiliated, degraded, and looked down on for being something you literally have no control over and when you speak up at the millionth snippy comment about your age this is taken as further proof that you should be humiliated, degraded, and looked down on.
“Of course you got mad about being degraded for being 21! That’s just proof that you’re 21! Lol typical 21 year old behaviour!”
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 yay!!! So fun!
Listen I do admit I am vagueing someone here, but this needs to be said (although it shouldn’t have to be): when you’re trying to defend yourself and explain that you’re definitely not a bigot, maybe don’t call someone a slur!
Like you shouldn’t use slurs in general but it doesn’t help your case that you’re totally not bigoted when you are calling someone a slur (even a slur that’s “unrelated” to the bigotry at hand)
TLDR: Don’t call people slurs.
Unironically I think the early to mid 20s age group in America has unbelievably bad consent boundaries on all levels and so much language to defend it but this makes me sound like elon musk if I say it however the commonality of someone who will be like “I had 47 panic attacks and it’s your fault” if you tell them no is insane
I rejected someone and got called “the scariest person I’ve ever met” with so much therapy speak interspersed like alright okay alright okay alright okay
“You just say whatever you’re thinking and I don’t know how to handle it” was verbatim part of this conversation. Also everyone hates to see an autistic bitch
When I was in this age bracket, there was a huge emphasis on improving consent culture via graceful rejection, and it's gone by the wayside. Which sucks.
Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.
More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.
Being someone who cannot handle rejection makes you much more likely to violate boundaries, and yes, that includes sexual ones. Yes, you, reader who has never hurt a fly. If you don't want to stumble backwards into sexually assaulting someone, fix your RSD meltdowns. If you keep them up it's only a matter of time. Because if you're nice enough to interact with, but are known to have RSD meltdowns, guess what happens when your friends and acquaintances need to reject you?
this makes me really sad to reblog as someone who struggles with rejection. i'm asexual and i unfortunately have it in the way where i am the one being sexually assaulted or abused
i'll reject someone and then they'll get upset so i either don't defend myself or give in because i'm afraid of upsetting them and losing them
so i don't think it's exactly right to say that having RSD or struggling with rejection makes you more prone to sexual assault. it does makes you more prone to sexual trauma, whether you're the victim or perpetrator.
for me, it's a lack of self esteem from trauma. but my self-esteem alone doesn't cause sexual assault. there needs to be something else going on that makes people to think it's okay to push someone or center their emotions in someone else's consent - usually a sense of entitlement or desire for control or security.
otherwise it'd just be having a difficult conversation. if you don't feel safe telling the other person that you're struggling emotionally, then either there needs to be an accommodation so you can communicate, or the relationship needs re-assessing.
not because anyone's bad, but because that's what you do. prioritize both people's safety and wellbeing. it's okay to not be ready for a relationship or sexual interaction. it's okay.
PS: communication requires you understand no means no. if you can't communicate that to your partner, then you have no business having sex.
Yes! Thank you! Every time I see this post on my dash it pisses me off, because it’s an otherwise good post that fumbles the landing by ending with “if you don’t “fix” yourself you will become an abuser” and it’s like… I don’t think that’s true… Maybe its a bit more nuanced than that.
i said it without nuance on purpose.
"abuser" is not an ontological category, just like "racist" or "homophobe" are not ontological categories. abuse, racism, and homophobia are actions done by individuals (and also systems in a sociological sense but that's tangential to the point.)
when i said "if you don't control this mental health symptom you will eventually enact abuse," i said that on purpose, because if you don't control this mental health symptom you will, factually, with near total certainty, eventually enact abuse.
because punishing people for rejecting you is coercive. the only thing that prevents it rising from "coercion" to "abuse" is the magnitude of the situation in question. when it's over something minor like "getting invited to social events," yeah, that's not really abuse, it's an annoyance. but life is full of rejection in many arenas. eventually, you'll face rejection in a situation involving something more impactful like sex, or domestic labor, or financial support.
if you have not built any control of your RSD, this will have a predictable outcome: abuse.
this phrasing two replies up is very telling:
"so i don't think it's exactly right to say that having RSD or struggling with rejection makes you more prone to sexual assault. it does makes you more prone to sexual trauma, whether you're the victim or perpetrator."
it's pretty obvious how absurd that phrasing is, but i want to dig into the motivation behind it, because it's important.
rates of perpetration of sexual assault (i.e. "what percentage of people have committed at least one sexual assault in their lifetime") are incredibly high, across the board. they're higher in certain demographics (e.g. men) but there isn't a demographic on earth where it isn't way higher than you would think just from knowing people in that demographic. you are friends with rapists! right now. if you have more than like 10 friends it is a near statistical certainty.
people find this very difficult to talk about without modifying the language specifically for the "gentle, nuanced" context. they don't want to say "a significant fraction of my friends have almost certainly committed at least one sexual assault." because sexual assault is the word that they use when they're conceptualizing it as exclusively a willful act by ontologically evil abusers. they would prefer to say "a significant fraction of my friends almost certainly have sexual trauma histories, as victims and/or perpetrators." to soften it. to pretend that rape committed by an "evil person" and rape committed by a "good person" are fundamentally different phenomena with different impacts, when they are not.
i point this out because this post has been floating around for months, which means it's been seen by thousands upon thousands of people who think of themselves as morally good, who have sexually coerced at least one person with rejection meltdowns in the past, and may not have considered the possibility that this qualifies as rape or sexual assault before reading this post. this post will hit them incredibly hard! it might stick with them for days, weeks, months. i knew it would do that and i did it on purpose.
(btw, that's not to imply that i think people responding negatively to the post are in that camp - in fact, i think the people in that camp are more likely to either silently ignore the post, or repost it positively to get a small hit of guilt-relief feelings. i think people writing negative responses are more likely to be in the 'anxious about doing it in the future' camp.)
again, i did this on purpose. there were two target audiences for this post: people who have enacted abuse with rejection meltdowns, and people who haven't done it yet but are at risk of doing it.
there are also many responses to this post from people who've suffered that abuse, and i'm happy to have contributed positively to their emotional processing, but that's actually just an incidental positive side-effect! abuse victims were not my target audience.
people doing abuse and at risk of doing abuse were my target audience. so the post was, frankly, pretty fucking confrontational.
you have to wake people up to the gravity of their capability to do harm for them to take it seriously and shape up.
Literally not what only-knives and I said at all.
It’s clear you have a very set in stone view of this and aren’t interested in engaging in what we were actually talking about, so I’m not going to bother defending myself against something I didn’t say.
my response was more "explaining my intent" than "arguing with an assertion you made," so i'm confused what you think i want you to defend?
you complained about my lack of nuance. i explained that the lack of nuance was deliberate and purposeful, and explained my motive for writing it that way in detail.
the reply above you used a phrasing i found telling so i explained what i felt that paragraph's phrasing was indicative of, from a sociological-analytical perspective. it's the same rhetorical technique underpinning statements such as "people call adult women 'girls' far more often than the call adult men 'boys' and this trend is indicative of [explanation of a specific form of infantilizing misogyny.]" it's linguistic analysis by example, nothing more.
i'm not really arguing directly with either of you. the main point i disagree with you two on - "phrasing a warning about RSD and boundary violations as inevitable-without-action is ableist" - i pretty much just didn't mention, and left interpreting my words as a rebuttal to that as an exercise to the reader.
Yes, you literally are arguing with an assertion I made. You literally end this reply with “ I disagree with the thing you said.”
You need to understand that “mentally ill people are inherently dangerous and abusive” is a widespread bigoted myth. One that has been used as a justification for doing violence to them for hundreds of years. A myth that continues to justify violence and abuse.
There is an ocean of difference between “xyz behaviour is/can be harmful, so it’s your responsibility that you don’t hurt others with it” and “xyz behaviour makes you inherently abusive”
You also can’t claim that abuser isn’t a special type of person while at the same time claiming that special types of people are inherently abusers. It just doesn’t hold water!
You’re trying to tell people that they can hurt people with their words and actions, no one is immune to it, and I’m telling you that that’s what you’re doing right now. You are not immune to being ableist. You have a responsibility to not perpetuate harmful myths about marginalized people, which, sorry, but that requires nuance. You can’t just sweep it under the carpet just because it’s easier.
my good bitch they sent me to the elementary school where they constantly locked us in unpadded windowless 5x5 solitary confinement cells for having tantrums, when i had never hurt a fly, i was just an autistic kid who yelled a lot. you think i don't know what an ableist stereotype is?
"stereotypes exist" doesn't absolve us of our moral obligations.
"we can't talk about serious intracommunity problems because the hateful people might see that it reinforces a stereotype and use it against us" is a noxious, evil sentiment that is far too widespread.
i have spoken to residents of group homes who feel like they are unable to stop the chronic sexual assault by their adult autistic housemates because if they speak up, it would feed the "autistic men are creeps" stereotype. this shit hurts people. fucking severely.
preventing sexual harm is more important than managing our fucking image as a minority subgroup.
(bigots do this on purpose, by the way. that's why so many hateful stereotypes are about abuse and/or sexual violence. because the bigots think it's just hilarious when we become too frozen with fear of the stereotype to build healthy communities, and end up letting abuse fester. a stark example of this is the right wingers who've been trying to astroturf a "lesbians are prone to domestic abuse" stereotype using maliciously misinterpreted studies for the past several years. they make memes out of screenshots of real abuse victims coming forward with statements like "i wanted to give her a chance because nobody gives us chances, but i can't take it anymore." people spending more time in abusive relationships to try to "prove them wrong" is the funniest thing in the world to them.)
Im so incredibly sorry you were abused but you do not get to call me a bitch. You are no longer worth talking to, and clearly it would useless to try.
"kids are so whiny and annoying" you want them to be dependent on adults and obedient and silent and convenient but also independent and not needing anything but also without any sense of autonomy and agency but also going outside and getting off their damn phones but also staying inside so they don't get into trouble but also recognizing they have it good but also that the new generation is mindless and stupid but also just say what they want in clear and emotionally mature words but also stop asking for things AND you want them to not be pissy about it? get real
Unironically I think the early to mid 20s age group in America has unbelievably bad consent boundaries on all levels and so much language to defend it but this makes me sound like elon musk if I say it however the commonality of someone who will be like “I had 47 panic attacks and it’s your fault” if you tell them no is insane
I rejected someone and got called “the scariest person I’ve ever met” with so much therapy speak interspersed like alright okay alright okay alright okay
“You just say whatever you’re thinking and I don’t know how to handle it” was verbatim part of this conversation. Also everyone hates to see an autistic bitch
When I was in this age bracket, there was a huge emphasis on improving consent culture via graceful rejection, and it's gone by the wayside. Which sucks.
Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.
More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.
Being someone who cannot handle rejection makes you much more likely to violate boundaries, and yes, that includes sexual ones. Yes, you, reader who has never hurt a fly. If you don't want to stumble backwards into sexually assaulting someone, fix your RSD meltdowns. If you keep them up it's only a matter of time. Because if you're nice enough to interact with, but are known to have RSD meltdowns, guess what happens when your friends and acquaintances need to reject you?
this makes me really sad to reblog as someone who struggles with rejection. i'm asexual and i unfortunately have it in the way where i am the one being sexually assaulted or abused
i'll reject someone and then they'll get upset so i either don't defend myself or give in because i'm afraid of upsetting them and losing them
so i don't think it's exactly right to say that having RSD or struggling with rejection makes you more prone to sexual assault. it does makes you more prone to sexual trauma, whether you're the victim or perpetrator.
for me, it's a lack of self esteem from trauma. but my self-esteem alone doesn't cause sexual assault. there needs to be something else going on that makes people to think it's okay to push someone or center their emotions in someone else's consent - usually a sense of entitlement or desire for control or security.
otherwise it'd just be having a difficult conversation. if you don't feel safe telling the other person that you're struggling emotionally, then either there needs to be an accommodation so you can communicate, or the relationship needs re-assessing.
not because anyone's bad, but because that's what you do. prioritize both people's safety and wellbeing. it's okay to not be ready for a relationship or sexual interaction. it's okay.
PS: communication requires you understand no means no. if you can't communicate that to your partner, then you have no business having sex.
Yes! Thank you! Every time I see this post on my dash it pisses me off, because it’s an otherwise good post that fumbles the landing by ending with “if you don’t “fix” yourself you will become an abuser” and it’s like… I don’t think that’s true… Maybe its a bit more nuanced than that.
i said it without nuance on purpose.
"abuser" is not an ontological category, just like "racist" or "homophobe" are not ontological categories. abuse, racism, and homophobia are actions done by individuals (and also systems in a sociological sense but that's tangential to the point.)
when i said "if you don't control this mental health symptom you will eventually enact abuse," i said that on purpose, because if you don't control this mental health symptom you will, factually, with near total certainty, eventually enact abuse.
because punishing people for rejecting you is coercive. the only thing that prevents it rising from "coercion" to "abuse" is the magnitude of the situation in question. when it's over something minor like "getting invited to social events," yeah, that's not really abuse, it's an annoyance. but life is full of rejection in many arenas. eventually, you'll face rejection in a situation involving something more impactful like sex, or domestic labor, or financial support.
if you have not built any control of your RSD, this will have a predictable outcome: abuse.
this phrasing two replies up is very telling:
"so i don't think it's exactly right to say that having RSD or struggling with rejection makes you more prone to sexual assault. it does makes you more prone to sexual trauma, whether you're the victim or perpetrator."
it's pretty obvious how absurd that phrasing is, but i want to dig into the motivation behind it, because it's important.
rates of perpetration of sexual assault (i.e. "what percentage of people have committed at least one sexual assault in their lifetime") are incredibly high, across the board. they're higher in certain demographics (e.g. men) but there isn't a demographic on earth where it isn't way higher than you would think just from knowing people in that demographic. you are friends with rapists! right now. if you have more than like 10 friends it is a near statistical certainty.
people find this very difficult to talk about without modifying the language specifically for the "gentle, nuanced" context. they don't want to say "a significant fraction of my friends have almost certainly committed at least one sexual assault." because sexual assault is the word that they use when they're conceptualizing it as exclusively a willful act by ontologically evil abusers. they would prefer to say "a significant fraction of my friends almost certainly have sexual trauma histories, as victims and/or perpetrators." to soften it. to pretend that rape committed by an "evil person" and rape committed by a "good person" are fundamentally different phenomena with different impacts, when they are not.
i point this out because this post has been floating around for months, which means it's been seen by thousands upon thousands of people who think of themselves as morally good, who have sexually coerced at least one person with rejection meltdowns in the past, and may not have considered the possibility that this qualifies as rape or sexual assault before reading this post. this post will hit them incredibly hard! it might stick with them for days, weeks, months. i knew it would do that and i did it on purpose.
(btw, that's not to imply that i think people responding negatively to the post are in that camp - in fact, i think the people in that camp are more likely to either silently ignore the post, or repost it positively to get a small hit of guilt-relief feelings. i think people writing negative responses are more likely to be in the 'anxious about doing it in the future' camp.)
again, i did this on purpose. there were two target audiences for this post: people who have enacted abuse with rejection meltdowns, and people who haven't done it yet but are at risk of doing it.
there are also many responses to this post from people who've suffered that abuse, and i'm happy to have contributed positively to their emotional processing, but that's actually just an incidental positive side-effect! abuse victims were not my target audience.
people doing abuse and at risk of doing abuse were my target audience. so the post was, frankly, pretty fucking confrontational.
you have to wake people up to the gravity of their capability to do harm for them to take it seriously and shape up.
Literally not what only-knives and I said at all.
It’s clear you have a very set in stone view of this and aren’t interested in engaging in what we were actually talking about, so I’m not going to bother defending myself against something I didn’t say.
my response was more "explaining my intent" than "arguing with an assertion you made," so i'm confused what you think i want you to defend?
you complained about my lack of nuance. i explained that the lack of nuance was deliberate and purposeful, and explained my motive for writing it that way in detail.
the reply above you used a phrasing i found telling so i explained what i felt that paragraph's phrasing was indicative of, from a sociological-analytical perspective. it's the same rhetorical technique underpinning statements such as "people call adult women 'girls' far more often than the call adult men 'boys' and this trend is indicative of [explanation of a specific form of infantilizing misogyny.]" it's linguistic analysis by example, nothing more.
i'm not really arguing directly with either of you. the main point i disagree with you two on - "phrasing a warning about RSD and boundary violations as inevitable-without-action is ableist" - i pretty much just didn't mention, and left interpreting my words as a rebuttal to that as an exercise to the reader.
Yes, you literally are arguing with an assertion I made. You literally end this reply with “ I disagree with the thing you said.”
You need to understand that “mentally ill people are inherently dangerous and abusive” is a widespread bigoted myth. One that has been used as a justification for doing violence to them for hundreds of years. A myth that continues to justify violence and abuse.
There is an ocean of difference between “xyz behaviour is/can be harmful, so it’s your responsibility that you don’t hurt others with it” and “xyz behaviour makes you inherently abusive”
You also can’t claim that abuser isn’t a special type of person while at the same time claiming that special types of people are inherently abusers. It just doesn’t hold water!
You’re trying to tell people that they can hurt people with their words and actions, no one is immune to it, and I’m telling you that that’s what you’re doing right now. You are not immune to being ableist. You have a responsibility to not perpetuate harmful myths about marginalized people, which, sorry, but that requires nuance. You can’t just sweep it under the carpet just because it’s easier.
So I’ve talked about the silly and often ableist way pro-psychs talk about abuse.
“You must always be aware and in control or you will abuse someone!”
“Aware” meaning magically telepathic and “control” meaning performing sanity 24/7. And in order to perform sanity 24/7 you need meds and therapy.
My first gripe is how impractical this “advice” is. No one can be “aware” and “in control” all the time. No one. And my second gripe is, of course, the insistence that you need meds and therapy in order to be a respectful person.
So my question is, what would practical, therapy-less advice look like?
For example, I’ve heard a few times, “taking a moment and coming back once you’re calm” when someone tells you you’ve hurt them. Like that’s actual practical advice.
And on the subject of RSD I feel like practical advice would be “respect the original no, don’t go through with xyz if the other person suddenly changes their mind after you became visibly upset”
This is just for starters. I just wondered if anyone else had like actual advice other than the psychiatry-approved pathways.
There is no mental illness/madness/neurodivergence/etc that will make you abusive. That is false.
“Having a certain behaviour is/can be harmful to others, even abusive, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re respecting others and their boundaries” <- correct statement
“Having xyz mental illness means you will abuse and assault others, so you have to fix yourself so you don’t” <- just ableism
“Having behaviour like (called in psychiatry) RSD can increase your likelihood of hurting, coercing, abusing someone, so it’s important to be self-aware of your actions and patterns” <- correct statement
“Having RSD will turn you into an abuser unless you control it!” <- just ableism
Because the belief that psychiatrized people are inherently dangerous and abusive has been the justification for doing actual violence to them for hundreds of years, so it’s actually pretty important to make the above distinctions.
And believing that mental illness will always cause abuse often leads to believing that all abuse must be caused by mental illness. Creating a convenient category of person to blame for all abuse and violence, and to say “well I’m not mentally ill so I can’t be abusive!”.
But what’s that? You don’t believe only mentally ill people can be abusive? Great! Oh wait… you say mentally ill people are inherently abusive? Hmm… Something doesn’t add up…
You can’t simultaneously believe that “abuser” isn’t a special type of person while at the same time asserting that there are special types of people who are inherently abusive (unless they fix themselves). You can’t have it both ways! Either abuse is a choice that anyone can make regardless of mental health or it’s some sort of curse you’re destined to enact.
Sorry you have to think about nuance but unfortunately life is messy and complicated and you have a duty to be respectful of others, including psychiatrized people.
And like while it should be acknowledged that some behaviours are harmful, (and some more than others sometimes) and people who have been harmed, assaulted, or abused by people with xyz behaviour absolutely deserve space to talk about it, the inverse should also be acknowledged.
A lot of people with stigmatized behaviours/disorders/etc are abused by their friends/family/intimate partners! Specifically because of the belief that mentally ill people are inherently dangerous and abusive! How many have been told the whole “no one else will love you” schtick?
So thinking that mentally ill people are inherently abusive is a pretty dangerous belief actually!
There is no mental illness/madness/neurodivergence/etc that will make you abusive. That is false.
“Having a certain behaviour is/can be harmful to others, even abusive, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re respecting others and their boundaries” <- correct statement
“Having xyz mental illness means you will abuse and assault others, so you have to fix yourself so you don’t” <- just ableism
“Having behaviour like (called in psychiatry) RSD can increase your likelihood of hurting, coercing, abusing someone, so it’s important to be self-aware of your actions and patterns” <- correct statement
“Having RSD will turn you into an abuser unless you control it!” <- just ableism
Because the belief that psychiatrized people are inherently dangerous and abusive has been the justification for doing actual violence to them for hundreds of years, so it’s actually pretty important to make the above distinctions.
And believing that mental illness will always cause abuse often leads to believing that all abuse must be caused by mental illness. Creating a convenient category of person to blame for all abuse and violence, and to say “well I’m not mentally ill so I can’t be abusive!”.
But what’s that? You don’t believe only mentally ill people can be abusive? Great! Oh wait… you say mentally ill people are inherently abusive? Hmm… Something doesn’t add up…
You can’t simultaneously believe that “abuser” isn’t a special type of person while at the same time asserting that there are special types of people who are inherently abusive (unless they fix themselves). You can’t have it both ways! Either abuse is a choice that anyone can make regardless of mental health or it’s some sort of curse you’re destined to enact.
Sorry you have to think about nuance but unfortunately life is messy and complicated and you have a duty to be respectful of others, including psychiatrized people.
Unironically I think the early to mid 20s age group in America has unbelievably bad consent boundaries on all levels and so much language to defend it but this makes me sound like elon musk if I say it however the commonality of someone who will be like “I had 47 panic attacks and it’s your fault” if you tell them no is insane
I rejected someone and got called “the scariest person I’ve ever met” with so much therapy speak interspersed like alright okay alright okay alright okay
“You just say whatever you’re thinking and I don’t know how to handle it” was verbatim part of this conversation. Also everyone hates to see an autistic bitch
When I was in this age bracket, there was a huge emphasis on improving consent culture via graceful rejection, and it's gone by the wayside. Which sucks.
Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.
More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.
Being someone who cannot handle rejection makes you much more likely to violate boundaries, and yes, that includes sexual ones. Yes, you, reader who has never hurt a fly. If you don't want to stumble backwards into sexually assaulting someone, fix your RSD meltdowns. If you keep them up it's only a matter of time. Because if you're nice enough to interact with, but are known to have RSD meltdowns, guess what happens when your friends and acquaintances need to reject you?
this makes me really sad to reblog as someone who struggles with rejection. i'm asexual and i unfortunately have it in the way where i am the one being sexually assaulted or abused
i'll reject someone and then they'll get upset so i either don't defend myself or give in because i'm afraid of upsetting them and losing them
so i don't think it's exactly right to say that having RSD or struggling with rejection makes you more prone to sexual assault. it does makes you more prone to sexual trauma, whether you're the victim or perpetrator.
for me, it's a lack of self esteem from trauma. but my self-esteem alone doesn't cause sexual assault. there needs to be something else going on that makes people to think it's okay to push someone or center their emotions in someone else's consent - usually a sense of entitlement or desire for control or security.
otherwise it'd just be having a difficult conversation. if you don't feel safe telling the other person that you're struggling emotionally, then either there needs to be an accommodation so you can communicate, or the relationship needs re-assessing.
not because anyone's bad, but because that's what you do. prioritize both people's safety and wellbeing. it's okay to not be ready for a relationship or sexual interaction. it's okay.
PS: communication requires you understand no means no. if you can't communicate that to your partner, then you have no business having sex.
Yes! Thank you! Every time I see this post on my dash it pisses me off, because it’s an otherwise good post that fumbles the landing by ending with “if you don’t “fix” yourself you will become an abuser” and it’s like… I don’t think that’s true… Maybe its a bit more nuanced than that.
i said it without nuance on purpose.
"abuser" is not an ontological category, just like "racist" or "homophobe" are not ontological categories. abuse, racism, and homophobia are actions done by individuals (and also systems in a sociological sense but that's tangential to the point.)
when i said "if you don't control this mental health symptom you will eventually enact abuse," i said that on purpose, because if you don't control this mental health symptom you will, factually, with near total certainty, eventually enact abuse.
because punishing people for rejecting you is coercive. the only thing that prevents it rising from "coercion" to "abuse" is the magnitude of the situation in question. when it's over something minor like "getting invited to social events," yeah, that's not really abuse, it's an annoyance. but life is full of rejection in many arenas. eventually, you'll face rejection in a situation involving something more impactful like sex, or domestic labor, or financial support.
if you have not built any control of your RSD, this will have a predictable outcome: abuse.
this phrasing two replies up is very telling:
"so i don't think it's exactly right to say that having RSD or struggling with rejection makes you more prone to sexual assault. it does makes you more prone to sexual trauma, whether you're the victim or perpetrator."
it's pretty obvious how absurd that phrasing is, but i want to dig into the motivation behind it, because it's important.
rates of perpetration of sexual assault (i.e. "what percentage of people have committed at least one sexual assault in their lifetime") are incredibly high, across the board. they're higher in certain demographics (e.g. men) but there isn't a demographic on earth where it isn't way higher than you would think just from knowing people in that demographic. you are friends with rapists! right now. if you have more than like 10 friends it is a near statistical certainty.
people find this very difficult to talk about without modifying the language specifically for the "gentle, nuanced" context. they don't want to say "a significant fraction of my friends have almost certainly committed at least one sexual assault." because sexual assault is the word that they use when they're conceptualizing it as exclusively a willful act by ontologically evil abusers. they would prefer to say "a significant fraction of my friends almost certainly have sexual trauma histories, as victims and/or perpetrators." to soften it. to pretend that rape committed by an "evil person" and rape committed by a "good person" are fundamentally different phenomena with different impacts, when they are not.
i point this out because this post has been floating around for months, which means it's been seen by thousands upon thousands of people who think of themselves as morally good, who have sexually coerced at least one person with rejection meltdowns in the past, and may not have considered the possibility that this qualifies as rape or sexual assault before reading this post. this post will hit them incredibly hard! it might stick with them for days, weeks, months. i knew it would do that and i did it on purpose.
(btw, that's not to imply that i think people responding negatively to the post are in that camp - in fact, i think the people in that camp are more likely to either silently ignore the post, or repost it positively to get a small hit of guilt-relief feelings. i think people writing negative responses are more likely to be in the 'anxious about doing it in the future' camp.)
again, i did this on purpose. there were two target audiences for this post: people who have enacted abuse with rejection meltdowns, and people who haven't done it yet but are at risk of doing it.
there are also many responses to this post from people who've suffered that abuse, and i'm happy to have contributed positively to their emotional processing, but that's actually just an incidental positive side-effect! abuse victims were not my target audience.
people doing abuse and at risk of doing abuse were my target audience. so the post was, frankly, pretty fucking confrontational.
you have to wake people up to the gravity of their capability to do harm for them to take it seriously and shape up.
Literally not what only-knives and I said at all.
It’s clear you have a very set in stone view of this and aren’t interested in engaging in what we were actually talking about, so I’m not going to bother defending myself against something I didn’t say.
if I see one more "why age verification is bad" post that doesn't even bother to mention that locking young people out of huge sections of the public sphere - literally the stated goal and primary impact of this shit - is wrong in and of itself I will simply start hitting people with bricks
yes yes biometric data privacy blah blah adults can hypothetically by harmed by this too. what about the immediate and deliberate and not at all hypothetical harm to youth. why are you acting like a potential data leak about what your face looks like, which if it ever happened would at least be generally recognised as a problem, is a more serious issue than cutting millions of people off from information and community and public expression which is happening right now in the open with large scale support
it's got the stench of fucking "banned books week" on it. thousands of adults congratulating themselves for reading books literally no one is trying to stop them from reading while doing nothing to improve access for the young people who are the ones actually having those books made off-limits to them.
Age verification is bad because the internet is how we communicate in the modern world, and young people deserve the right to communicate just as adults do.
And because there is no "young people on the internet" problem that couldn't be solved by educating and materially empowering young people.
Also this explicitly includes neurodivergent young people, Mad young people, and "anti-recovery" young people.
Queer people who are still inexplicably pro-psychiatry and anti-youthlib will sometimes "compromise" like "Sometimes young people having internet privacy is Good, like when queer kids with unsupportive parents discover queer positivity and sex ed, but sometimes young people having internet privacy is Bad, like when Mentally Ill™️ kids whose parents are trying to Get Them Help discover Anti-Recovery!" and no, that one is also Good. Kids need to learn how to discreetly flush their risperdol just as much as they need to learn how to access condoms and binders.
People only seem to care about “bad writing” when marginalized people are involved, don’t they? Like tv, movies, books, etc have always had bad writing and often specifically because of bigotry! Like your decision to have your woman character be replaceable with a lamp is bad writing and it is inherently political! But often people only label things as such when marginalized people and their experiences are at the forefront. So do you actually care about “bad writing” or are you actually a bigot?
I bring a whole “you have a moral responsibility to unlearn your trained disgust response to marginalized people/features” vibe that the “being ugly is okay uwu” crowd really don’t like
